Anyone who thinks having children is an effective way to make your marriage better is mental. Even before Gershom it seemed like things were always hard between us. Our backgrounds for one thing. I mean, if it weren't for her ancestors carting off Joseph I never would have been born in Egypt in the first place. Did I hold that against her? No. But, there's a reason why Elohim said not to plow with an ox and a donkey together. Not to sound pretentious, but I grew up under the finest tutors in Egypt and she was raised by sheep. Not saying she wasn’t intelligent. She was quick enough, and charming too, when she wanted to be, but let’s just say the name Zipporah was aptly chosen. She was constantly flitting between this and that. Unstable as water and an explosive temper. She never said so, but she may have been resentful of my age too. I was forty when I opened the well for her and she was young enough to be my daughter. I’d kept myself in fighting condition in Egypt though, and also there aren’t a whole lot of men on the backside of Sinai to choose from, so there's that. I should have been more surprised at how willing Jethro was to give her to me as my wife. I mean, if it was my daughter I would have been a little more hesitant to give her away to a strange man who showed up as a fugitive from Egypt. “Why are you here?” he’d asked me the night I arrived. It was getting late. The desert was cold at night and we were sitting around the firelight. Zipporah was half concealed in the shadows, wrapped in a coarse woolen blanket. I couldn’t see her face, but the firelight reflected off her pupils so I knew she was observing, and listening. She was always listening, even when you thought she wasn’t.

“I killed an Egyptian and buried him in the sand,” I’d said after a moment’s hesitation. He’d looked at me askance for a moment, poked the fire with a stick, then replied, “One less Egyptian in the world never hurt anyone.” Zipporah hadn’t even moved, but her pupils did seem to burn for a moment through the darkness, but that could have been my imagination.

It may have been a relief for her father to marry her to me. He was a patient man, but everyone has their limits.

It was a long time before she got pregnant. She wasn’t particularly intimate with me and I think we were both surprised to find out she was expecting. At first I was hopeful that a child would unite us, or at least that being a mother would temper her volatility. It didn’t. Naturally energetic and vigorous, she was peevish and cantankerous while pregnant. She was sick, big, and slow. Then it was the name. She didn’t like the name Gershom because it means "a stranger there".

“I’m not a stranger here,” she’d told me. “This has been my home since I was born. Just because you’re a Ger here doesn’t mean _my_ son should have to be marked with it.” I was always a Ger to her. Not just in the land but in our marriage. She always ridiculed me. Like her father, she was no fan of Egypt and even though I wasn’t Egyptian, I may as well have been to her. Maybe it was worse that I wasn’t.

Then Gershom was born. He was a handsome boy, dark like Zipporah. We fought about the circumcision. I don't mind admitting that I was circumcised as a baby, and even if I was raised Egyptian it was my circumcision that reminded me of where I came from, so it seemed good to me that Gershom should be circumcised too. Wow. That old saying about not assuming anything contains a lot of wisdom, because when he was seven days old I mentioned circumcising him the following day and Zipporah came apart at the seams. Her exact words are lost to me because I was busy trying to shield my face from her claws, but the gist of it was that if I so much as came near her boy with a knife she’d be happy to perform a second circumcision on me, and a far more generous one than what I’d received as a baby. Lord in heaven, forgive me, but what do you do with a woman like that? Maybe if he’d sent Zipporah to Pharaoh as the first plague he could have saved the other nine for a different time.

Anyway, I let that one go. Maybe it was just an outmoded custom, I told myself. A man has to give preference to his wife sometimes doesn’t he? If that wasn’t enough contention in my life though, God himself decides to show up as a flame of fire on the backside of Horeb while I'm out tending sheep. That was wild. Trust me, I understand how crazy it sounds, and if I hadn’t been convinced that I’d lost my mind already, this would have done it. I can’t repeat the whole story here, it's too fantastical, but here's the main point - I was to liberate Israel from Egypt. Me, your humble servant Moses, at eighty years old. Can you believe that? Cause I couldn't, and guess what? Zipporah didn't either. First she looked at me without speaking for a full minute - not in a contemplative or compassionate way that way you might look at your grandfather if he'd gone batty, but more like Cain looked at Abel right before bashing his head in with a rock. Following that she asked if I’d eaten any wild berries of unknown origin before this mysterious vision. Of course I hadn’t, and I protested my cause so vigorously that if she didn’t believe me, she at least stopped arguing. That is, until I explained to her that we had to go to Egypt, and that God was going to use me and my brother Aaron to deliver Israel from Pharaoh. This didn’t go over very well. She scoffed, mocked, spit at me, accused me of self-important delusions, and then dismissed the entire idea out of hand.

Just between us I was relieved. Jethro's tents were a commutable distance from Egypt and it would be stressful enough just dealing with Pharaoh. I could swing by and pick her up after me and Aaron got everything sorted out in Egypt. Little did I know that Jethro had a different idea. He told Zipporah she couldn’t stay with him, and that a woman should stand by her man. I’m not sure whether he believed God, me, or just saw his chance for some peace and quiet. "Go in peace," he'd said to her, then added silently, "and leave some behind for me." Neither of us were anxious to leave, so we made "preparations" for a few days, but on the third night I had a disturbing dream and God told me it was time to go, and that the people who were looking for me in Egypt had joined the sands of the desert so to speak. He also gave me the message for Pharaoh, "Let Israel go or I'll slay your firstborn son." Ouch. That's the type of message where the messenger really does get killed, but what are you going to tell God, No? So the next morning we packed up what little belongings we had and started off - me, Zipporah, Gershom, and our youngest boy (I'll tell you about him a different time. It's a long story).

Apparently God had been speaking to my brother Aaron too, because he was on his way to meet me. I didn't know that until later, after the blowout with Zipporah. I'm not mad, in fact in a way I sympathize with her.

We'd been traveling all day, everyone was exhausted, and the boys were as happy as cats getting a bath. I was covered with camel dust, the water had run out miles before, and all conversation had devolved into bickering and whining when, out of the darkness we see a light, and praise God it's illuminating an Inn. That immediately elevated everyone's spirit, but before we'd covered half the distance to our welcoming destination who decides to show up but God himself. I would have appreciated a chance to rest and get cleaned up before facing Him, but you know how He is. He kind of operates on His own schedule. And what does He do first thing? Tries to kill me. Not really, or else I'd be dead, but it was serious enough for Zipporah to finally get the hint about the whole circumcision thing. Without so much as a by-your-leave she reaches into the leather camel bag, pulls out a sharp flint, and slices Gershom's foreskin off. I'll let you imagine how well that went. She then takes the muddy (yes, dust and blood make mud) foreskin and throws it at me while yelling profanities directed toward my character. Truly I believe this whole exercise was planned by the Lord to help me overcome my fear of Pharaoh. Maybe a slow death in a palace dungeon wouldn't be so bad. At least it would be quiet.

After we got our room at the Inn and got Gershom settled down, cleaned, and bandaged I crashed out and slept the sleep of the dead. I was exhausted. Anyone who says eighty is the new forty isn't anywhere near eighty. When I awoke the next morning the air was still cool and the sun just breaking the horizon, but she was already gone, both her and the boys. She'd taken the camel and gone. Did I feel a guilty sense of immediate relief? Yes, but I would be remiss to say I wasn't a little despondent too. I still had my staff, the rod of God, but there is another kind of staff that supports a man too.

I would see her again, much later, and by then we were both very different people, but that's a story for next time. Right now I'm needed at the tabernacle.